Students grading teachers

Waste of time

Regarding “System to evaluate teachers gets ‘F’ grade” (Page A13, Monday), I was a professor at a university in New York state and at one in Texas for a total of 42 years, and during those years we were subjected to the laughable exercise of student evaluations. Here is my experience:

• If the students do not want to learn, they will not learn and blame the outcome on the teacher, who is thwarting their chances of becoming world famous brain surgeons.

• If the parents do not discipline their children but expect them to graduate with flying colors, they blame the teacher who is causing mental anguish to their offspring.

• If the students want to retaliate, they know they MAY hurt the teacher by a bad review.

• In some cases, the students even go as far as claiming sexual harassment to strike a blow.

• If the teacher has high standards of classroom behavior and gives challenging examinations, it is nearly guaranteed most of the reviews will be poor.

• The lower the quality of the institution in term of admission standards and expectations, the more the complaints by the students.

• If you ask the students why they want to study their major subject, a large fraction answer: “To get a degree.” What for? “To get a job.” The fraction that reply: “Because I love poetry or biology or whatever is very small. Some of them even go as far as saying: “Because my parents wanted me to go to college.”

• After putting up with that nonsense, some of my colleagues and I decided to run a simple test: We asked the students to rate us, voluntarily, and to sign the evaluation sheet (with printed names since most have zero penmanship). No penalty for not turning in a review and no obligation to identify themselves if they turned the evaluation sheets in. Result: practically no one who was critical signed the document.

Moral: Forget it! Ivan Bernal, Houston